Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev, 1892-1938, was a Russian economist and founder and first director of The Institute of Conjecture between 1920 and 1928.
Kondradiev is mainly known for his studies on business cycles, specially for his major work “The Major Economic Cycles”, 1925. Kondratieff identified a long business cycle in capitalist economies with a duration of 50 to 60 years, the so-called Kondratiev cycle. He explained that they were due to re-investment cycles, of capital goods with a long lifetime.